[yocto] [OE-core] Bug reporting and good bug reports

[Khem Raj]

> On Jan 7, 2015, at 1:25 AM, Richard Purdie <richard.purdie at linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> 
> I was informed on irc yesterday that bug reports are hard and that
> debugging via irc is easier. I think I need to remind people why good
> bug reports are important and how they do actually help immensely.
> 
> I do actually believe that not everything has to have bug report. If you
> mention an issue, someone says "hey, I know how to fix that" and sends a
> patch out, a bug report is wasted overhead IMO. I know some programme
> managers who disagree strongly with me and would suggest *every* bugfix
> commit should have a defect tracking item. We're not going there I
> understand the idea, its not practical.
> 
> That said, if its not immediately clear what the problem is, it should
> become a bug report. Why?
> 
> Firstly, the random selection of people on irc at the time probably
> aren't the right people to fix it. Telling those people to read 48 hours
> of irc log for the details is disrespectful of their time.
> 
> It also happens that the first people referred to a bug may not be the
> person who actually can fix it. If someone else needs to come to a bug,
> having a summary of the issue, the salient facts and the current status
> is immensley useful for handover.
> 
> As a case in point, I tried to debug a qt4 build failure yesterday for
> which there is no bug report. I lost hours building the wrong things,
> experimenting to try and find the reproducer steps and generally chasing
> my tail, losing the autobuilder log of the failure, the name of the qt4
> recipe that was failing (which task was it again?) and so on.
> 
> I do now have a set of reproducer steps, its quite simple:
> 
> MACHINE=imx53qsb bitbake virtual/kernel
> MACHINE=imx53qsb bitbake virtual/kernel -c clean
> MACHINE=imx53qsb bitbake qt4-x11-free
> 
> I also have a patch. Where should I share them? How do I ensure everyone
> with an interest in this defect actually gets the patch? Sure I can
> create email and send to the people who I think need to know. The
> bugzilla lets interested parties add themselves to bugs though.
> 
> I should also note that QA actually go through bugs in the bugzilla,
> including closed ones, looking for test cases. We're not great at this
> yet but it does happen. If there is a well documented test case like
> that above, we might write an automated QA test for it. Having it
> documented is therefore a good thing.
> 
> I do appreciate writing a bug report is hard, especially if you don't
> know where the problem is, or how to reproduce it exactly. It takes time
> and effort. You can however document what you know and discussion can
> happen in a common place to figure out how to reproduce it. I do except
> the submitters to fully understand the bug, if they did they'd probably
> write a patch instead.
> 
> So fair warning, I am going to start ignoring things on irc and ask for
> bug numbers in future, assuming something isn't a 5 minute fix with an
> immediate patch. I will back and encourage anyone else doing this too.

What about developer mailing lists ?. isn’t it also a way to report problems via emails after all
we use emails for patch work flow. Not all people working with OE-Core e.g. might be following yocto bugzilla